Flat Broke

There was an extraordinary TV programme in Britain on Monday evening which surprisingly received no further media coverage as far as I could discover throughout yesterday. It was titled, as is this posting, 'Flat Broke' and mainly recounted the plight of an apparently single mother with a very young baby who lived in the South of England but had (unseen) invested in flats to rent last year, two in Bury and two in Manchester all priced about halfway between 100,000 and 200,000 pounds. It followed an auction of one such flat, apparently with a sitting tenant paying monthly rent just below five hundred pounds, two bedroomed, two bathroomed which failed to attract any bids at ninety thousand, then eighty thousand and finally seventy thousand pounds and was hence withdrawn from the bidding. At least Hamish Macrae in The Independent this morning is one commentator prepared to address this meltdown, read here. Read the article then ask yourself this: Should the taxpayer spend more billions to bail out financial institutions of the kind who lent so much to this foolish woman, or should they be allowed to follow her into bankruptcy?